Aleksandar Knjeginjic, who was finally sentenced to eight years in prison for crimes in Prijedor, has, according to posts by activists in this town, launched a petition to ban the marking of the White Armband Day, which disturbs the victims, while legal experts consider it hate speech that should be punished.
Knjeginjic, who was finally sentenced by the Supreme Court of Republika Srpska (RS) to eight years in prison for war crimes, that is, participation in the killing of civilians in March 1994, launched the petition “Stop the ‘White Armband Days'” at the beginning of June on the platform Peticije.online, which he shared on his social media and through live calls.
“I want to point out to my fellow citizens that with such actions, before all our eyes, the organizers, supporters and participants of the ‘White Armband Days’ event are throwing mud at the Serbian people. Even more alarming is that the authorities of the City of Prijedor, throughout all the ‘revelry’ on the city streets, calmly watch and tacitly approve,” reads the text of the petition that activists announced was launched precisely by Knjeginjic.
By Saturday morning, 16 people had signed the petition on this online platform.
In mid-June, as local activists who saw him reported, he began collecting signatures in the center of Prijedor, where he invited citizens to sign “a document that will show that they are not murderers, but those who in 1992 started the bloody rampage in the streets.”
“Help to remove the cancerous tissue that is growing before our eyes every day and becoming bigger and bigger,” is also stated in the post on Aleksandar Knjeginjic’s profile on the social network Facebook where his photo was published showing him collecting signatures.
Knjeginjic was previously convicted in the United States (U.S.) for fraud in obtaining U.S. citizenship. The verdict stated that he concealed an indictment according to which in 1994 he participated in the murder of two Bosniak civilians, a married couple, for which he was sentenced to 12 months in prison.
Edin Ramulic from the association “Jer nas se tice”, which organizes the White Armband Day and who himself was detained in the Prijedor camp “Trnopolje”, said that this petition deeply disturbed him.
“This can happen only in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), that a convicted war criminal sets up a stand in the main square and collects signatures against court-established facts about the Prijedor white armbands,” added Ramulic.
Speaking about the call to sign the petition, Ramulic says that for Knjeginjic in this case “the cancerous tissue” are Bosniaks, Croats, and others who, after being expelled, returned to Prijedor. He called on citizens not to sign the petition, but also all politicians who can influence to take action to prevent the collection of signatures.
“This petition cannot harm the marking of the White Armband Day, it actually shows what kind of people deny the white armbands. But this hate speech must be curbed because in Prijedor there has not been talk like this since the war and war crimes,” explained Ramulic.
The White Armband Day is marked in Prijedor, but also around the world, every May 30th, in memory of 1992 when Bosniaks, Croats, and other non-Serbs, when moving around Prijedor and the surrounding area, were forced to wear white armbands and thus marked their houses as well.
The Hague Tribunal in at least two final verdicts determined that the non-Serb population of Prijedor was forced to “in sign of loyalty to the Serb authorities” hang white sheets in front of their houses and wear white scarves on their arms. The Tribunal established in its verdicts that several thousand people were killed during the war in Prijedor and that thousands of Bosniaks and Croats passed through camps.
White armbands, as court-established facts, were previously denied by various groups from Prijedor, such as “Samopostovanje” and “Princip”, who three years ago influenced the ban on the peaceful march on the occasion of the White Armband Day, and constantly, with their narratives, denied the existence of white armbands, and labeled activists who are fighting for the construction of a monument to the murdered children of Prijedor.
After this ban, BiH media reported the connection of these two organizations with the city authorities, the political party United Srpska in Prijedor, as well as how they glorified war criminals and provided support to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Klix.ba writes.
